Creating content for your company’s blog? From careful goal-setting to creative community building, these examples from some of the world’s best business blogs will help you perfect your approach.

8 key lessons from world-class business blogs

• Hook ‘em with the headline!

• Find your niche

• Know your goal

• Form (meaningful) partnerships

• Create a community

• Repurpose great content

• Track the competition

• Practice makes perfect

1. Hook ‘em with the headline!

Most people use headlines as a gauge of whether they want to read the rest of your blog.

The average reader only spends 37 seconds on your blog post, so anything you can do to make them stick around is worth the added effort.

A great headline achieves three things:

• It’s written in your tone of voice

• It gives the reader insight into what the blog is about

• It makes them want to carry on reading!

Take a look at this example from Fast Company:

The blog title asks a question and also makes it easy to see who the target audience is. This piece of content is primarily for business owners concerned about leading their company through trying times. The second half of the title also implies this question will be answered by someone who has (at least some of) the answers.

Don’t underestimate the role of the subtitle. Once someone is on the blog page, a few well-chosen words can help contextualise and pique interest, as they do here.

Instead of imagining that readers will be hanging on your every word, make it easy for them. Depending on the niche you’re writing about (more on this later), you could be competing with thousands of other blogs that do what you do, but do it better.

Optimise your headline - and any subheadings you use - to be useful, urgent, and unique.

When you’re writing your headline, ask yourself:

• Who is this for?

• Why should they read it?

• What do I want to tell them?

Your headline is the difference between people clicking to view the full blog, and losing interest. Start with a working title and refine it when you’ve written the main content.

2. Find your niche

Deciding on the blog, niche is another crucial factor. While it might seem simpler to just write about whatever thought happens to be crossing your mind at the time, this will lead to lots of complications as the blog starts to grow.

Choosing a niche is a way to make your life easier. Niche blogs tend to rank more highly for SEO, and by writing about topics related to a specific subject, you can become a trusted expert in that field.

Finding the area of expertise to focus on is not only helpful for you and/or your copywriter: it’s equally as useful for the audience.

If they don’t know what to expect from your content, then readers have no framework to guide them. Even the most enthusiastic will quickly lose interest and find a blog that provides them with a bit more clarity.

Some growing blog niches include:

• Digital marketing

• Health and fitness

• Finance and investment

• Food and recipes

• Personal development

Hubspot is a wonderful example of niching done right! The company sells inbound marketing, sales and customer service products - but it’s also become famous for its superb blog content on these topics.

The brand’s blog content niche is broad enough to ensure plenty of variety, specialised enough to provide clarity, and closely tied to the brand itself. For your own blog, you could be even more specific, if you decide there’s enough content generation potential.

Hubspot has now generated so much content that it segments its blogs into subsections (as above), making it easier to find what you’re looking for. They also create a mix of different content types that support the blog, keeping everything fresh and relevant to their audience of marketers and business owners.

Instead of leaping from one topic to the next, cultivate trust by being consistent. A simple fix is to write blogs about what you already know and gradually expand your own knowledge base and blog topics from there.

This overarching theme will likely be content related to your industry or service – providing opportunities for thought leadership and broadcasting your expertise to the world.

3. Know your goal

Now you’ve figured out your niche, decide what it is you want to achieve from the content you share. Some blogs are designed to be profitable via on-page ad revenue or sponsorship. Others are there to generate leads and direct traffic to the website.

What do you want your reader to do when the blog is over? Not only is this helpful to establish before you start writing - but it’s essential to making the blog worth reading in the first place!

The action you want people to take doesn’t have to be as straightforward as asking them to buy your products. Your goal could be to simply get people thinking about your brand.

There are some great examples of thought leadership-oriented blogs in diverse industries.

Lab Talk is AstraZeneca’s blogging platform. It provides a space for company scientists to share advice and insights with a global audience of like-minded people. The blog reinforces their expertise and explores ‘what science can do’. Visitors are invited to examine topics in-depth and engage with new ideas.

This approach works on numerous levels. Firstly, it gives scientists at AstraZeneca a place to broadcast their thoughts and collaborate with one another on longer reads. This will help them feel supported in their work, but it also ensures AstraZeneca can continuously reinforce its own forward-thinking approach through the company’s connection to the insights shared on the platform.

Once you’ve decided what it is you want your blog to do, you can start focusing on content that supports that goal. This aspect of your blogging strategy is closely linked to the niche but will impact the practical setup and much of your content planning.

4. Form (meaningful) partnerships

Very few business blogs are written by just one author. Depending on the scope of your blog, there may simply not be enough time for you to create all the content you’d like to - so outsourcing to other writers, within or outside of the company, makes perfect business sense.

As long as everyone is aligned under the same shared goals, spreading the blogging burden won’t diminish your tone of voice or areas of expertise.

Blogs such as TechCrunch, which sources its content from submissions by tech experts, writers, and enthusiasts, keep the tone consistent and the quality-level high by being selective about the content that gets published.

On TechCrunch, writers need to first ‘pitch’ their ideas and wait to see if they’re selected. Sometimes the website requests blogs on a specific topic, in accordance with its own content planning goals. Because of the strong focus on quality, this approach results in both depth and breadth of ideas and analysis in the resulting blog content.

Nobody likes to feel that they’re being targeted by advertising, so sponsored blog posts are also a popular way for blogs to generate content, increase revenue, and grow partnerships. While this tactic doesn’t work for everyone, it can be a mutually beneficial way to bridge the gap between the blog audience and the brand that’s commissioned the sponsored blog.

5. Create a community

Depending on your business sector, community building may be an essential part of your overall communication strategy: and an active, engaging blog can help. For example, B2B businesses have lots to gain from differentiating their offer via their blog content and staying close to their leads.

Contently is an example of active community building in action. The brand invests considerable time in generating a steady stream of quality blog content - but also makes it easy for people to engage with it. On arrival at the blog homepage, you’re immediately met with a pop-up encouraging further engagement, and commitment to reading the brand’s content:

The tone of voice is playful, familiar and compelling. Through phrases like ‘content marketing hell’, Contently appeals to customer pain points while making it easy for them to engage with future content. The best blogs - whether for business or any other purpose - are never really ‘just a blog’.

Instead, they are part of an ongoing conversation between the writer(s) and the audience.

Many blogs act as a gateway to additional content. They usually provide an enticement to carry on the communication stream elsewhere. Some typical calls to action might ask the reader to:

• Join a newsletter

• Read another article

• Watch a video/listen to a podcast

• Buy key products/services

• Contact you for a chat

As you can see, there’s no ‘right’ way to go about this - but building a community via your blog content is an effective way to ensure a steady stream of readers, and also helps to give you a clearer picture of who is engaging with the content in the first place, and where you should be sending them.

Be interactive. Address your readers directly, asking them the kind of content they’d like to see moving forward. Incorporate a poll. Include your blogs in your email marketing.

Get creative and draw inspiration from brands like Contently.

6. Repurpose great content

Tech news website The Verge is fantastic at crafting headlines you want to click on and using different content formats to produce blogs. This blog uses a podcast interview with Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg as its centrepiece.

It’s a long read, but visitors to the webpage are also given the option to simply listen to the podcast - choosing the media format that works for them. From the title alone, readers know who this is for and what it’s offering them:

We can see right away those small businesses will find this a fascinating piece of affirmation and encouragement, and could potentially discover new opportunities through engaging with it.

The suggestion that Wordpress and Tumblr are ‘keeping the internet weird’ will also appeal to maverick spirits who enjoy some of the quirkier content that can be found on the web.

The Verge’s decision to reuse its podcast in this way shows imagination and ingenuity, as well as consideration for the audience and their needs.

Other opportunities for reworking existing content include transforming video interviews into blog posts, embedding your own video into your blogs, and using blog posts as the basis for your email newsletters or campaigns.

Of course, to have content worth repurposing, you need to first invest time and (sometimes) money in creating great content that survives the transfer from one format to another.

7. Track the competition

Benchmarking is standard business practice for many other areas of your company and something you should do with your blog content, too.

No content is created in a vacuum. All of these businesses dedicate resources to reviewing the approach of their closest competitors.

Some blogs exist within roughly the same area but produce vastly different content. Inc is dedicated to providing companies with advice and relevant content, but it targets start-ups and deploys a more casual approach and tone than a blog such as the Harvard Business Review (which aims its content at business leaders).

Look around at what others are doing and see what you can glean from their tactics, and how you can differentiate yourself. Carry out a competitor analysis to identify areas for expansion and improvement, and regularly engage with competitor content.

8. Practice makes perfect

Don’t expect your blog - or your blogging strategy - to be set in stone, or perfect from the outset. Instead, view it as an evolution, regularly assess and reassess, and get started from exactly where you are right now.

The examples shown here have taken years of testing and perfecting to get right, and like every blog, they’re still a work in progress, changing their approaches when needed to meet new user demand and better reflect where each company is on its own journey.

The best company blogs are the result of continuous exploration and experimentation.

Feeling inspired?

Head to the Sookio blog for more creative campaigns or get in touch for help crafting your own compelling copy!

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